Epilogue: Promoting Local Culture to Repress Dissent

In our first
interview in August 2005, Tafataona Mahoso told me, “The object of study must
interrogate its examiner.” I should have understood. When I visited his office unannounced five
months later in December, his elegant secretary greeted me by name: “Hello, Mr.
Bakshi.” I smiled sheepishly at her, but even in my vanity I could not fathom
why she still remembered me. Sitting
aboard a British Airways flight one week later on December 30th, 2005, I was again
hailed unexpectedly: “Amar Bakshi?” I nodded yes. A flight
attendant grasped my shoulder and quickened his pace, “Please collect your
bags; there are some men waiting for you outside.” Five men in faded tan
suits stood waiting on the causeway and told me I was in their world now.

They led me to a
bare, soundproof room and began the “interrogation of the examiner”: “Why do you come here to film us? Whose cameras are those? Why have you stolen
our information? What propaganda are you making? What party do you support? Who
do you work for? BBC? CNN? CIA? How long have you been a spy? Confess to it and
you will be OK…otherwise we will stop being so friendly…”

Their skepticism
of foreign message-makers was well rehearsed.
The men rolled in a TV deck and played the three VHS tapes I had stored
in my backpack. The tapes contained liberation documentaries and the
jingles. I protested, “I am a student
researching youth culture,” but a man in a faded brown suit with pitiless eyes
just turned to me and smirked. He knew
that documentaries and jingles were political, despite his government’s claim
to the contrary. I stayed silent, shaking.

That night I was
locked into a small, dark cell alone.
The following morning they took me to Harare Central Police Station and
from there, I was shuttled into a dark underground jail where 120 other
detainees were being held for everything from petty theft and insulting the
president to murder. The damp cell was
infested with ticks. Mother’s exposed
midriffs were covered in bites because they had been slowly tearing away their
clothes to clean their babies’ backsides.
Three of these women awaited a seven-year sentence for having attempted
an abortion. Their infants would join them in jail and grow up as
prisoners. This was the Zimbabwe that
all citizens feared, and only few had seen.

Despite starvation
rations and widespread illness, prisoners looked out for one another. They shared food with the young and elicited
favors from drunken guards on behalf of other inmates. Seeing this, I better understood how
Zimbabweans have managed to endure astonishing decline by binding
together. I also learned how a few acts
of extreme physical violence gave the rhetoric of the enemy, bounded or
unbounded, real teeth. The media spread
the fear that originated from concrete acts of violence by policemen and in the
prison. I also learned how words, images
and national narratives could be leveraged by the weak or powerful for perverse
ends. A man vying for food told his
competitor that he would report him for insulting Mugabe if he kept holding
onto the bread. At my interrogations,
police guards seemed delighted in watching me squirm at their threats of
torture. They used the rhetoric of the
regime to presume my guilt and then to assume my crime was worthy of the worst
punishments. “Agent journalists were
ruining Zimbabwe,” they said simply.

From one to three
times a day, I was called up for interrogation sessions lasting between two to
eight hours. After quickly determining
institutional affiliations, questioners probed my belief structures, my view of
world events, my multiple interpretations of their country and its plight. Different Intelligence Officers dwelled on my
views of President Mugabe’s 25-year rule and the balance of world powers. They told me I was guilty until I proved
myself innocent. Different people
conducted the interviews with unique styles – furious, disinterested, or
quietly sadistic. None of them referred
to me by name. They used an epithet:
poison.

In retrospect that
noun choice seems significant. To the
layman’s eye, poison is indistinguishable from other substances. Only specially trained devices, like a litmus
test for acid, can discover if a liquid is a poison. Poison’s effects are not localized. Like the Trojan Horse, poison slips past
one’s outer defenses disguised. Once
inside, poison spreads rapidly to threaten all organs and alter the totality of
a body. It is unbounded, internalized.
Constant surveillance of minor fluctuations in the body is necessary to detect
it before its too late. Once found, an
antidote must be distributed across the body to neutralize the substance. Malcontents, dissidents and saboteurs, like
poison, must be stopped everywhere for the health of the whole to be
assured. I was one of those elements for
them, but I believed that words or images were ultimately unworthy of an
authoritarian regime’s brutal attention at a time of national crisis.

The state and its
jailers knew that words, narratives, and well placed silences were essential
tools in the exercise of their power.
But there was a strange paradox lurking in the affair. What spy overtly films his targets, sitting
across from them in their ministerial offices pointing a camera? I was given rare access to the highest levels
of ZANU-PF, but just after filming and before constructing my own account, I
was interrogated, my belief structures dissected, and my motivations critiqued. Then I was released carrying with me an internal
experience that is impossible to share with others, a fear that still unnerves
me. Somehow this seems like Moyo’s
paradox at work.